Rajkumar Buyya sounds fanciful talking about interplanetary grid
computing - until he reminds you that harnessing the combined processing power
of computers was a crazy idea a decade ago.

At the time, Buyya was part of a team networking DOS-based desktop computers to
build distributed supercomputers - a virtual computer possessing the combined
processing power of each PC.

Working at India's Centre for Development of Advanced Computing in Pune, Buyya's
ideas of such clusters outperforming dedicated supercomputers had also been
dismissed as fanciful. Yet, while the supercomputing elite were sniggering at
his small-scale network, Buyya was dreaming of a cluster spread across a global
network such as the internet.

The experience taught him to believe in his own ideas no matter what the
establishment said.

"At the time I think people thought it was a crazy idea because networks were so
slow, so how could you gain out of it?" Buyya says.

"People who were doing high-end stuff that requires tight coupling of components
felt that this wouldn't take off. Now networks have become faster and cheaper
and it is becoming reality. Today I see those same people building these
systems."

Buyya moved from India to Australia in 1998 to undertake a PhD at Queensland
University of Technology, examining the challenges faced in building a globally
distributed computing cluster.

By this time and before it was bought by Microsoft, the free web mail service
Hotmail was hosted on a Linux-based cluster, making it one of the world's most
prominent examples of grid computing. "Today there are clusters everywhere;
right now, Google is a poster boy for this as an application that everybody
uses and everybody knows," Buyya says.

With his trademark "think big" approach to technological challenges, Buyya hopes
interplanetary exploration will lead to computer networks reaching across the
solar system within 20 years.

Such optimism got him his start in the software industry, travelling from rural
India to the IT hub of Bangalore to sleep on a friend's couch and cold-call
software developers until he landed a job.

Today he is senior lecturer and StorageTek (USA) Fellow of Grid Computing at the
University of Melbourne and works with the university's Grid Computing and
Distributed Systems (GRIDS) Laboratory.